Formation of educational strategies of Youth

Abstract

The article examines how orientations and a real choice in the education of young people are formed under the influence of transformation of the labor market and employment. The dynamics and the current state of youth employment are analyzed on the data of State Statistics of Russia over the past two decades. The decline in the level of employment (particularly strong and significant among the youngest age groups) which occurred under the influence of the increase of the coverage of peers by education day is shown. Under the influence of transformations in the economy, restructuring of youth employment was more intense than in the entire working population. This led to a radical change: at the end of the Soviet period there was a significant predominance of employment in material production versus employed in non-material one; today the proportion of latter has risen sharply and became prevalent. Due to the higher educational potential of youth the ratio of white and blue-collar in professional and qualification structure of employed 20-29 year olds became close to two to one, which is identical to those in developed countries in Europe. Today, the branch and qualification structures of youth’s employment differ from the entire population by especially progressive trends of structural changes, which are relevant to trends of the post-industrial economy. The features of today's youth educational strategies are analyzed on the base of two comparative sociological surveys – 1998 and 2013 – of graduates of daytime secondary schools of the Novosibirsk region. The impact of the demographic situation (reducing of the number of peers) on a number of parameters is fixed: the unification of plans to enroll in university, secondary specialized colleges and vocational schools of three groups of graduates (from schools of Novosibirsk, medium and small cities, villages of the region); a significant convergence of their distribution by types of institutions (prevalence of enrolled in higher education institutions); the features of plans and a real choice of budget and paid training places; specifics of orientations and real admission to universities which are differentiated by rank of the prestige and a competitive accessibility.